The Prime Minister may have suffered a rare sartorial slip in his white tie
outfit, but at least he was wearing the correct clothes

For once, I sympathise with the Prime Minister. Put yourself in his size 9 Church’s Oxfords. There you are in white tie, sitting at the top table at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the Guildhall, about to make a keynote speech on foreign affairs and Britain’s place in a newly interconnected world. You realise that you have eaten possibly a little too well. Ordering the cheese is starting to feel like a big mistake. Leaning back in the chair, to aid digestion, your mind wanders to what is happening to rebel Tory MP Nadine Dorries in that evening’s edition of I’m a Celebrity.

A smile plays across your lips. Then, with no warning, disaster strikes. Two of those annoying little dress-shirt studs can no longer take the strain. “Pop” they go, leaving your tummy exposed to the world. You don’t notice at first. But a sharp-eyed photographer in the audience does, and soon pictures of this wardrobe malfunction will be snapped up by newspapers and circulated on the internet.

While leading politicians talk a great deal about the “squeezed middle”, it is extremely rare for us to get a glimpse of the Prime Minister’s own squeezed middle. The failure of his shirt studs under pressure, and his hastily attempted recovery when he felt a draught wafting over his stomach, was embarrassing.

I cannot join in the criticism, however. At least David Cameron was, to borrow another phrase beloved of modern leaders, trying to “do the right thing”. Refusing to dress properly looks like a dated hangover from decadent boom-time Britain, the mad era when there was seemingly so much growth that the only question seemed to be how the proceeds might be shared out. On Monday, as his hosts and the audience had a right to expect at the Guildhall, Mr Cameron was wearing white tie and all the trimmings.

This is something that Gordon Brown infamously avoided. New Labour had been in power for eight years before Mr Brown gave in. The first occasion on which he reluctantly agreed to wear white tie was at Edinburgh University in 2005, when he, Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, and Alan Greenspan, the one-time head of the US Federal Reserve, gathered to celebrate the end of boom and bust, somewhat prematurely as it turned out. For his economic efforts, that day Mr Greenspan was given an honorary degree and Mr Brown wore white tie.

Other than that, for most formal occasions which required black or white tie, Mr Brown turned up in a poorly tailored lounge suit and bland, standard-issue, Labour red tie. This was meant to signify that he was both “in touch” and somehow more comfortable, as though his comfort was the point.

This is the main mistake often made by those who declare formality, and in particular the tie, dead. They assume that it is about self, when it isn’t. Wearing a jacket and tie for work, or complying properly with a dress code as a guest, is about respect for others. At issue is not what the wearer wants. What matters are his customers, colleagues or voters. Millions of Britons, those who don’t work in the media, and the many older people who spent decades having to dress properly for work, see it in terms of basic good manners.

Yet even the man who this week is in charge of the BBC, Tim Davie, opted for the open-necked approach when he turned up for his first full day in post. Did he really not think it worth putting a tie on for a round of important television interviews? If the BBC was not already running so many inquiries into itself, I would suggest that this should be investigated by the BBC Trust. At least Lord Patten always wears a tie.

Of course, Mr Davie is not alone, certainly in London. In the so-called “creative industries” men are always tie-less, as they make their way from a breakfast workshop session in trendy Soho, and head for a meeting, skinny latte or fruit smoothie in hand, to do some blue-sky thinking. Earlier this week one of their number turned up without a tie in front of a Parliamentary committee which wanted to grill him on his company’s tax affairs. Matt Brittin, the CEO of Google UK, looked as though he had come straight from a nightclub.

Even Nick Clegg now goes open-neck. For his televised apology on tuition fees – an occasion on which he was inviting himself into voters’ living rooms via the medium of television – he was tie-less. Happily, when Mr Clegg starts doing something, it is obviously about to go out of fashion.

I am not suggesting ties should be mandatory at all times. Men need not wear them in the shower, or when jogging. But these are serious times, as the Prime Minister reminded us in his speech at the Guildhall. Britain is up against all manner of countries with hundreds of millions of ambitious workers who will do anything for a bit of growth – including dressing appropriately if asked to.